The damage for such a poor country sitting at the forefront of a growing climate-change-based destruction from the recent extreme rain event has been tremendous. At least 115 people have died. Nearly six million have been impacted. The government has run out of medicine, water purification tablets, and temporary shelters for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced. More than 400,000 hectares of crops have been destroyed. Fully half a million homes have been damaged or lost. And there is not enough food or water to go around.

Fears of water-borne illness such as cholera are running high and calls for international aid in the flood-stricken state have grown more and more urgent. But the worst is not yet over as floodwaters from Nepal and India continue to swell Bangladesh’s multiple waterways over banks and into communities through central and southern parts of the country. And more rain may be on the way as another powerful storm system gathers.

(This is what happens if you keep burning fossil fuels. According to recent scientific reports, the global number of record-breaking rainfall events has increased dramatically during recent years. This increase has coincided with global temperatures exceeding the 1 C warmer than 1880s temperature threshold. Higher global temperatures amp up the hydrological cycle by squeezing more moisture out of land and ocean surfaces. A warmer atmosphere that’s more heavily loaded with moisture adds move convective energy to thunderstorms which tends to spike rainfall potentials for the strongest storms to higher levels. Image source: Increased Record-Breaking Precipitation Events Under Global Warming.)

In the Indian States of Bahir and Assam more than 430 people have lost their lives as schools have been buried under 8 feet of water, crops have been destroyed, roads have been washed out and power has been disrupted. As with Bangladesh, concern over contaminated water supplies has brought with it fears of water-borne illness as a gargantuan disaster relief effort gets underway.

Nepal has likewise seen its share of the pain and heartbreak. There, more than 140 people have perished in the floods as 40,000 families have been severely impacted.

(Hato, lower left, sets its sights on an already foundering South Asia on August 22nd. Image source: NASA Worldview.)

In total, more than 800 lives have been lost so far throughout these three countries. But the worst may be yet to come as, later this week, the remnants of Typhoon Hato will begin to affect the already-devastated region. Hato’s new injection of moisture and thunderstorms will bring back the potential for severe flooding over Nepal, India, and Bangladesh. Refilling rivers before they have a chance to subside and potentially generating yet one more major flood pulse for the lowlands.

46 Comments

climatehawk1

Suzanne

The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as other parts of the planet, and even here in sub-Arctic Alaska the rate of warming is high. Sea ice and wildlife habitat are disappearing; higher sea levels threaten coastal native villages.

But to the scientists from Woods Hole Research Center who have come here to study the effects of climate change, the most urgent is the fate of permafrost, the always-frozen ground that underlies much of the state.

Suzanne

At Understanding Climate Change at starting at the 14:16 point are images coming from India, Nepal and Bangladesh …just devastating.
(Also includes incredible images of torrential rains and flooding in Russian)

In any case, this is another hit to global agriculture this year. With food prices already inching up and many regions already impacted, this is yet one more bad turn. Over the past few years there’s been serious impacts to farming from both sides of the hydrological spectrum. This year’s floods in SE Asia and heatwave in Southern Europe are just two examples.

bostonblorp

A harrowing report as usual. The bridge collapsing at 21:35 when a family tries to rush across struck me as a tragic metaphor of the circumstances facing so many poorer people as the consequences of climate change grows year by year.

They’re on the front lines of climate change. And they’re the ones with the least resources to handle it. But it really is something that’s already impacting us all. Look at Trump, for example, pandering to fear of refugees. That’s climate change in your politics. And the worst kind.

wili

“ExxonMobil knowingly misled the public for decades about the danger climate change poses to a warming world and the company’s long-term viability, according to a peer-reviewed study, released on Wednesday, of research and statements by the US oil giant.”

Definitely a lot of double-speak going on. Still ongoing today. Notably, it hasn’t been too hard for these agencies both to exploit climate doubt, NIMBYism, and fear of new technology to their benefit.

wharf rat

Court hands pipeline opponents a major victory
The permit for constructing Florida’s Sabal Trail project has been vacated.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Tuesday that forces the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to reconsider the environmental impacts of the Sabal Trail pipeline and two related pipeline projects that run from Alabama to Florida.

In a case brought by the Sierra Club and two local environmental groups, a panel of three judges ruled that FERC had failed in its Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to adequately consider the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that will be served by the natural gas pipeline.

Bobinspain

As someone with some training in counseling and without wishing to sound self-preoccupied I find a rising sadness and disgust, something that I have to deal with, time and time again. A deep and overwhelming sadness for these people and a profound disgust for the forces that allow for and reinforce the status quo. I feel powerless, despite my education and my relatively privileged position, albeit modest by most standards. And yet, I sigh and shed tears sometimes, remaining thankful and grateful for what I’ve got. And yet the overwhelming sense of complete impotence, complete inability to offer any lasting solutions, at times, is all a little too much. I’m a life-long professional problem solver. This is is a problem that I can’t even begin to fix. Otherwise I’m ok.

Bobinspain

We occasionally help to re-home abandoned dogs, which is excruciatingly time-consuming, but I’ll continue to engage in this seemingly pointless fight against lack of kindness. That’s the problem. To be kind is to be stupid or weak or non-competitive, or at that, at least seems to be the perceived wisdom/ modus operandi.
Most of our problems stem from:
a/ Reality: our complete inability to accept reality, however it might best be presented to us. Denial of wisdom for fear of loss of ontological status.
b/ Hope: I could write a book about hope and how it has so completely deceived humanity. No wonder it was the last thing out of Pandora’s Box. Hope is the great delusion, the best excuse for ignoring reality. Hope is hopelessly over-rated.
c/ UnKindness: failure to move beyond animal cruelty, competition and accumulative simple greed, moving towards a greater all-embracing love of life. This isn’t about Hollywood and Bambi’s Mom. Oh, shit, I get lost for words, but it’s about the eternal wonder of everything and how it should be sacred without religious BS.

eleggua

“Caroline hosts Robert Scribbler, one of our most reliable narrative guides on climate crisis. Aka Robert Marston Fanney, whose fiction taps into a necessary deep well-spring of the sacred. We need our spirituality to be deeply informed, and our informed selves to be deeply spiritual, guided by mythic memory to honor and protect all life as sacred.”

“The closure of the [coal-fired] Navajo Generating Station [Page, AZ] could help advance those plans [developing another 500 megawatts of renewable power on the reservation]. As part of the power plant shutdown agreement, the Navajo Nation was granted transmission capacity on power lines that snake out from the facility. That access to transmission is a major advantage…”

eleggua

“As long as we’re addicted to hope, we feel that we can tone our experience down or liven it up or change it somehow, and we continue to suffer a lot. In a nontheistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning. You could even put “Abandon Hope” on your refrigerator door instead of more conventional aspirations like “Everyday in everyway, I’m getting better and better.” We hold onto hope and it robs us of the present moment. If hope and fear are two different sides of the same coin, so are hopelessness and confidence. If we’re willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation.”

“…One of the US state department’s three science envoys publicly resigned on Wednesday, the latest in a wave of defections over Donald Trump’s response to a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia…

The science envoys serve as unpaid volunteers and engage with government and non-government science officials around the world. In his letter, Kammen also criticized Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Climate Accord. The first letters of each paragraph spell out the word “IMPEACH.””

“The National Institutes of Health deleted multiple references to climate change on its website over the summer, continuing a trend that began when the Trump administration took charge of the dot.gov domain….

The references were altered on pages belonging to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, NIH’s division dedicated to the study of the environment and its effects on human health. NIEHS also removed links to an educational factsheet from two separate pages, and a page dedicated to explaining the environmental impacts of climate change.

The scrubbing was ineffectual, though, as the term was mostly only deleted from page titles and subheadings. “No other language changes were made and the term ‘climate change’ continues to be used in the body text of the page,” EDGI reported….”